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SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH
LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK Throughout these poems, with their roaming
sense of first-person, the speakers' minds are cavernous and
echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant and raw, in and out of
control of themselves. The effect is unpredictable and thrilling,
at once a dark art and an illumination of unease and loss and
wishfulness. The collection features disquieting songs of a mutable
self alongside poignant elegies, interior journeys and subtle (and
not so subtle) ripostes to the legacy of Trumpism - while elsewhere
encounters with ghostly feet and tongues of fire consort with riffs
on Baudelaire, Rilke and Laforgue. These poems twinkle with
mischief and humour, making for a pungent and haunting read.
Riordan - a poet whose strong, rippling influence is felt by all in
his wake - affirms his reputation at the forefront of contemporary
poetry.
These poems report on worlds both robust and delicate, from
boisterous pub-bluff to the oxygen bubble of an exquisite
underwater spider. Whether situated in the quiet lanes of his
native Co Cork or amid the bustle of his adopted London, Riordan's
poems exist between many states, poised at once in the grip of both
activity and stillness, concerned with speaking and listening to
what he hauntingly describes as 'the unwonted quiet'. There are
tributes to the departed and the living, the befriended and the
estranged; there are also conversations with poets, in memory and
in translation, from the Spanish and from the Irish. The collection
concludes with 'The Pilgrim' - that hovers eerily 'in patrol of the
edges', wherever they may be located. But just as these poems can
be sage, they are also mischievous, fun-loving, gregarious
creatures who like nothing better than to sing or to joke at your
ear. The Water Stealer is a book full of invention and delight,
whose hypnotic stories remind us of the variousness and the
enchantment of the world.
In a series of timeless and modern-day renditions, Maurice Riordan
brilliantly introduces us to the poems that founded Ireland's rich
literature. Memorable and accessible, these early lyrics are
presented in their classic incarnations by literary giants from
both sides of the Irish Sea: in examples by W. H. Auden, Flann
O'Brien, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Montague, Robert Graves and
Frank O'Connor. But the anthology is much more than a survey of
canonical texts; through a series of specially commissioned poems,
fresh eyes are brought to bear on these ancient poems: by Seamus
Heaney and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, by Paul Muldoon and Kathleen
Jamie, by Ciaran Carson and Christopher Reid, and many others. The
experience is enhanced still further by the enabling hand of
Riordan himself, in a sweep of exquisite translations of his own
made especially for this publication. Unforgettable and
inspirational, a book for giving and for keeping: The Finest Music
by some of the art-form's finest players.
Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a
copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection,
appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was
published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The
Waste Land, The Bridge was a love song to the myth of America and
its optimism a much needed boon to post-Wall Street Crash America.
Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932.
Quark,n. (Phys.) One of three hypothetical components of elementary
particles [from: 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' in Joyce's
Finnegans Wake] - The Concise Oxford Dictionary. In a wonderfully
eclectic and lively selection of poems, this anthology counters the
notion that science and poetry are magnetically opposed. The model
of the two cultures has collapsed. Just as poets write about
science and about recent scientific ideas, so too science has
reached out to the language of poetry for its own intimations on
the wilder shore of the here and the elsewhere. A Quark for Mister
Mark includes poems, old and new, whose subject is science - its
discoveries, its processes - but also poems which look at the world
with an inherently scientific gaze, whether before Copernicus or
after Einstein.
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The Play of Waves (Hardcover)
Immanuel Mifsud; Translated by Maurice Riordan
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R387
R249
Discovery Miles 2 490
Save R138 (36%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of
eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which
the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary,
townland and parish - is defined through the individual voices of
the poet's father and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours
(Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the
Gully). The settings of these loosely contiguous fragments almost
casually define a historical community, ranging around farm and
fields, through furze and ragwort, headland and plantation, haggard
and Bog - tracing the immemorial scenes of traditional farming
life: cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet
topping a?" and their close and intimate topography is recalled
with a Proustian fidelity to names (the Long Field, the Kiln Field,
the Small Fields, the Hill Fields, Higgs's Field, the Passage, the
old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom Glen) The tentative oral
fluidity of these remarkable poems flickers on the borderline of
prose, resolving complexities into an impression of timeless
pastoral life, at once archaic yet precisely pitched in time. Other
poems in The Holy Land proffer alternative forms of capture and
recapture, and resemble light-sensitive plates storing and
restoring what one poem refers to as 'the understory'. Thus the
stilled life of 1950s rural Ireland is recreated, with echoes of
classical models such as Theocritus, or of traditional Irish
materials from the Fenian cycle, celebrating 'the music of what
happens'. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his poem 'Epic': 'I have
lived in important places, times when great events were decided:
who owned that half a rood of rock...'
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The Play of Waves (Paperback)
Immanuel Mifsud; Translated by Maurice Riordan
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R293
R261
Discovery Miles 2 610
Save R32 (11%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Immanuel Mifsud is one of Malta's most influential writers, and
this, his second collection in English translation by the poet
Maurice Riordan, confirms his standing internationally as a poet of
distinction. Lyrical, melancholy, passionate, his poetry is highly
impressionistic, full of fleeting moments which reflect the
immutability of the natural world with its seasons and its 'play of
waves', the excitement and anguish of being alive, the
inexorability of old age, the unremitting darkness of what lies
ahead. Mifsud's language is direct and unadorned, yet the images he
creates are unsettling and deeply affecting. Maurice Riordan
describes the poet as a "latter-day troubadour, whose gloomy,
wayward, excessive poems deserve a wide audience", and this
selection of poems with their "plangent music and vibrant textures"
in this fine translation will certainly make its mark throughout
the English-speaking world.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE POETRY PIGOTT PRIZE IN ASSOCIATION WITH
LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK Throughout these poems, with their roaming
sense of first-person, there is depth at work where the speakers'
minds are cavernous and echoic, primal and sophisticated, observant
and raw, in and out of control of themselves. The effect is
thrilling and unpredictable, at once a dark art and an illumination
of unease and loss and wishfulness. The collection features
disquieting songs of a mutable self alongside poignant elegies,
interior journeys and subtle (and not so subtle) ripostes to the
legacy of Trumpism - while elsewhere encounters with ghostly feet
and tongues of fire consort with riffs on Baudelaire, Rilke and
Laforgue. These poems twinkle with mischief and humour, making for
a pungent and haunting read. Riordan - a poet whose strong,
rippling influence is felt by all in his wake - affirms his
reputation at the forefront of contemporary poetry.
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